Cover

Title Page, Copyright Page

Contents

Abbreviations

Introduction, Karen Houle and Jim Vernon

A century and a half separates Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Gilles
Deleuze. It would be hard to overstate the impact of these two major
European intellectuals, individually, on what has come to be called “Continental
philosophy.” What has proved equally hard, however, is to determine
the impact the thought of each thinker has on that of the other...

Part 1. Disjunction/Contradiction

1. At the Crossroads of Philosophy and Religion: Deleuze’s Critique of Hegel

For Hegel and Deleuze both religion and philosophy are undeniable
facts of human existence. Thus neither Hegel nor Deleuze can avoid
an account of how religion and philosophy relate to one another. For
Hegel religion and philosophy are related to one another as content
and form. For Deleuze religion and philosophy are two different types
of creation, which are often confused with each other but ultimately are ...

2. Negation, Disjunction, and a New Theory of Forces: Deleuze’s Critique of Hegel

I would like in this chapter to examine the relationship Deleuze establishes
with Hegel with a view to avoiding the false alternative often bandied
between Deleuze’s critics and defenders: that either Deleuze is a
naive and ill- informed reader whose polemic against his rival misunderstands
how dialectical his own thinking is, or that Hegel is unimportant...

3. Hegel and Deleuze: Difference or Contradiction?

In the foreword to Difference and Repetition,1 Deleuze locates his philosophical program in what he thinks is a broad current of “anti-Hegelianism,” and indicates that difference and repetition must take the place of identity, negativity, and contradiction. This programmatic statement deliberately
foregrounds his theoretical quarrel with Hegelian- type dialectics,...

4. The Logic of the Rhizome in the Work of Hegel and Deleuze

The aim of this chapter is to provide an account of Deleuze and Guattari’s
model of the rhizome, and to look at a possible Hegelian line of
response to it. After outlining why Deleuze and Guattari feel the need to
move away from an arborescent model of thought, such as underlies the
structure of judgment, I look at Hegel’s description of plant life in the ...

5. Actualization: Enrichment and Loss

One aspect of the difference between Deleuze and Hegel which has not
received suffi cient attention is their opposing views on “actualization,”
the becoming actual of a potential or of what Deleuze calls “the virtual.”
For Hegel, actualization is the outward manifestation and expression of a
truth or reality that had only been implicit. This process of manifestation
is at the same time an articulation of what had been inchoate, a determination...

6. Political Bodies Without Organs: On Hegel’s Ideal State and Deleuzian Micropolitics

Deleuze’s antipathy to Hegelian dialectics is well known.1 According to
Deleuze, Hegel is Nietzsche’s archenemy and Nietzsche’s pluralist theory
of forces is resolutely antidialectical: “The concept of the Overman is
directed against the dialectical conception of man, and transvaluation
is directed against the dialectic of appropriation or the suppression of
alienation. Anti-Hegelianism runs through Nietzsche’s work as its...

7. Deleuze and Hegel on the Logic of Relations

As is well known, one essential weapon Deleuze employs to oppose
Hegel is the thesis of the externality of relations.1 Hegel, after all, is the
archetypal thinker of organic relations between systematically structured
terms, and thus to escape him one must demonstrate that such putatively
necessary relations are in fact only contingently applied, and thus can ...

Part 2. Connection/Synthesis

8. Deleuze and Hegel on the Limits of Self-Determined Subjectivity

At the heart of Deleuze’s critique of Hegel is a contestation as to how to
conceive the disenchanted world that the Enlightenment bequeathed us.
The scientifi c rigor of modern philosophy reconfigured the self-world
relation in a manner that for the most part made the knowing subject
the arbiter of everything earthly. In the idealized narrative of modernity...

9. Desiring-Production and Spirit: On Anti-Oedipus and German Idealism

In many respects, Anti- Oedipus, the collaborative work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is a typical book of German idealist philosophy. Like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, Deleuze and Guattari model their work in Anti-Oedipus on the form of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and then use the form of Kant’s own project to develop a critique of Kant. I will ...

10. Hegel and Deleuze: The Storm

According to Deleuze, Hegelian contradiction is nothing but a false appearance
which does not even resemble difference. According to this
interpretation, the dialectic is completely governed by the privileged position
it bestows on identity: there is contradiction only in light of this
principle. Difference is judged from the start with reference to the calm
reign of identity, and is thereby barred from ever truly sojourning in...

Deleuze’s longest discussion of Hegel, the fi fteen- page passage in Difference
and Repetition, chapter 1, 61–76/42–54,1 is (until the end of it) his
most positive. What interests me is not his criticisms of Hegel, but the
way Deleuze forces Hegel’s dialectic into more becoming, and Hegel
forces Deleuze’s differences into more history. Deleuze discusses three
themes in Hegel’s logic: limit and the infinite; contradiction and ground; ...

12. Hegel and Deleuze on Life, Sense, and Limit

In this chapter I draw Hegel and Deleuze into slightly closer proximity
than either Deleuze or most scholarship on Deleuze (or Hegel) might
admit. I take up Alexandre Kojève’s1 and Andrzej Warminski’s2 semiotic
readings of Hegel and then contrast these with Deleuze. This contrast
is warranted since, against semiotics, Deleuze locates the sign and sense
outside of consciousness, and in the fold of Life. Deleuze reverses the...

Part 3. Conjunctive Synthesis

13. A Criminal Intrigue: An Interview with Jean-Clet Martin

In the “Postface to the Anglo-American Edition” of his Variations, Jean-
Clet Martin surprised his readers with the announcement of a new book
on Hegel. “I begin to feel,” he wrote, “the need for a book on the Phenomenology of the Spirit, where the enemy will fi nd a better place in the network of friendships, introduced by Deleuze in What Is Philosophy?, than he has found in the smiles of the most ardent disciples. In this book,...

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